Language, languaging, communication: linguistic norms and communicative competencies

Abstract Linguistic norms and meta-norms involve reward and punishment, which typically take the form of emotional-moral judgments of praise and blame, respectively. The intensity of the “drive for cooperation and a drive to serve punishments” (Damasio, A. 2005. The neurobiological grounding of human values. In J.-P. Changeux, A. R. Damasio, W. Singer & Y. Christian (eds.), Neurobiology of human values , 47–56. Springer Verlag) is functional in maintaining and policing the boundaries of a linguistic community by enforcing the social obligation to talk in the ‘right’ way. Against this backdrop, I consider Gregory Bateson’s discussion of the selectivity of purposeful consciousness and its inbuilt value biases. I examine some examples of transitivity patterns to illustrate the problems that arise in relation to patterns of thinking such as “language use” and “speaking a named language.” Alternatively, the idea that we use or speak a language must be replaced with a view founded in communication, seen as the mutual integration of activities by the co-participants in communicative activities. On this basis, we can re-consider communicative competencies and their implications for learning and the role of languaging in learning and in communicative processes more generally.